Free The Dark Story of Eminem by Nick Hasted Page B

whole lunchroom, which was a black dominated school and would be looking like, ‘Damn !’ It was like
White Men Can’t Jump
.”
     
    Other encounters, though, were more traumatic. “When you’re a little kid, you don’t see colour,” Marshall considered to
Spin
, “and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager, and started to rap. Then I’d notice that a lot of motherfuckers always had my back, but somebody always had to say to them, ‘Why you have to stick up for the white boy?’ I’d hang out on the corner where kids would be rhyming, and when I tried to get in there, I’d get dissed. A little colour issue developed, and as I got old enough to hit the clubs, it got really bad. I wasn’t that dope yet, but I knew I could rhyme, so I’d get on the open mics and shit, and a couple of times I was booed off the stage.” One incident in particular lodged in his mind. “I remember I used to go to this place called the Rhythm Kitchen way back in the day,” he said. “I was probably 16 or 17. The first time I grabbed the mic, I got booed before I even said anything. As I started to rap, the boos just got louder and louder, until I just got off the mic.”
     
    When it happened again, at another venue, it terrified him. “The first time I grabbed the mic at The Shelter [a Detroit MCs’ hangout], I got dissed. I only said, like, three words, and I was already gettin’ booed as soon as the mic was handed to me. I was like, ‘This is fucked.’ I started getting scared, like, ‘Is this gonna happen? What the fuck is gonna happen? Am I gonna make it or not?’”
     
    Many would have quit after one of those nights. For a teenager with self-esteem which was already battered, getting on stage must have been bruising enough. For jeering crowds to let him know he was not wanted in the places he most craved acceptance, sometimes before he could say a word, must have crushed him. The obsessive love of hip-hop he expressed in ‘Revelation’, the sense that only it could save his desperate life, must have had something to do with him picking himself up. But it was also true, as his subsequent career proved, that the beatings, insults and disappointments of his early days did not leave him shaking and weak. Instead, they toughened him, fed him aggressive resentment and rage, determined him not to be broken. The pressure of those early open mics only intensified his will to succeed. And the racist nature of the taunts, like the racist assaults he had suffered, did not make him stupidly racist back. Instead, it made him despise all racism, with a black rapper’s force.
     
    He gave his most thoughtful account of his resentments to
Spin
. “In the beginning,” he recalled, “the majority of my shows were for all-black crowds, and people would always say, ‘You’re pretty dope for a white boy,’ and I’d take it as a compliment. Then, as I got older, I started to think, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Nobody asks to be born, nobody has a choice of what colour they’ll be. I had to work up to a certain level before people would even look past my colour; a lot of motherfuckers would just sit with their arms folded and be like, ‘All right, what is this?’ I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the colour I am makes me any less of a person.”
     
    That diffident, defensive last sentence could have come straight from the mouth of one of Martin Luther King’s black marchers, 40 years before. The weird racial inversion of Marshall’s America was proven by the outlandish thing he said next. “There was a while,” he admitted bravely, “when I was feeling like, ‘Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this shit.’ I’m not ignorant – I